Month: March 2012

College teaches you how to think. However, unless you are engaged with your campus Career Center, college teaches you virtually nothing on the subject of career development. Think about how many courses you took in your major, and then think about how many semester-long courses you took on career development? A rare few colleges offer, at most, one or two courses on the topic. You spend time more time at work than in any other aspect of your life, but college teaches you barely anything on how to start, build and manage your career. Without the Career Center, you will be left on your own to figure out what you are suppose to do with your life. The transition is difficult because there is no syllabus for success. Here are my 50 tips to prepare you for the realities of working.

Go to the Career Center on campus at least once a semester and then every month when you are a senior.

Believe in yourself, believe in something and have someone believe in you.

Success comes from inside of you.

In addition to your college degree, employers will want to see multiple internship experiences. Your competition has them.

Start building your resume early in your college career. Don’t wait until you get back from spring break of your Senior year.

Be nice to your faculty. You’ll need them someday to serve as a reference for graduate school or a job.

Get clarity and focus on the three types of jobs you will pursue: 1) Ideal Jobs, 2) Back-Up/Realistic Jobs, and 3) Survival Jobs.

Come up with your own personal and professional definition of success and don’t let anyone else define it for you.

Your first job is a period of adjustment. It’s like being a freshman all over again. Be patient and learn the ropes.

Think of your first job as a stepping-stone that can help you get closer to your Ideal Job.

The weather’s heating up, but are your job hunting efforts cooling off?Fight the urge to abandon your search—stay on track and refresh your motivation with these tips:

1. Do Something You’re Awesome AtOne of the best ways to right burn out is to feel A. successful, and B. energized. This is most easily and effectively achieved by doing something you enjoy, and you kind of rule at. Be it table tennis, interpretive dance, or beating your niece at Crazy Eights, do it. The sillier (and most different from sitting in front of your computer, applying to jobs), the better. Extra points awarded for physicality.

2. Set Smaller GoalsIf your goal is simply to get a job offer, you don’t have a lot of control over your success. Which stinks, considering how long and arduous a job search can be. Instead, set smaller goals—quotas for resume send outs, or events attended, or “check ins” with contacts, so you can have little victories to celebrate on your way to the big one.

3. Stay SocialBurn out, by definition, means feeling tired and unmotivated. Your natural response may be to withdraw further, spending more time alone so as to avoid drains on your already low energy. But resist the urge: not only is it vital to your mood and attitude to stay connected, making the social rounds increases your chances of finding a job: it gets you circulating, and keeps you fresh in your friends’ minds. After all, if they haven’t seen you recently, how will they remember you when an opportunity arises?

4. Seek SupportJob hunting is a rejection game. No matter how hard you try to stay objective, the fact of the matter is, it’s going to start feeling personal when you don’t get call backs.If you keep in touch with others who are also on the hunt, you can compare notes on what’s working, what’s not working, and best of all, who’s getting rejected–because no matter how much it can feel that way, it’s not just happening to you.

In an extract from his new book, William Poundstone considers the logic puzzles, trick questions and mind-bending riddles that make Google interviews notoriously hard. Would you make it through to the next round.

We live in an age of desperation. Never in living memory has the competition for job openings been more intense. Never have job interviews been tougher.

For some job seekers, Google is the shining city on the hill. It’s where the smartest people do the coolest things. In the US, Google regularly ranks at or near the top of Fortune magazine’s list of 100 Best Companies To Work For. But unsexy firms also find themselves with multiple well-qualified applicants for each position. That is very good for the companies that are able to hire. Like Google, they get to cherry-pick the top talent in their fields. It’s not so good for the applicants. They are confronting harder, ruder, more invasive vetting.

This is most evident in the interviews. There are, of course, many types of questions traditionally asked in job interviews. These include the “behavioural” questions that have almost become clichés: “What is your biggest failure in life?” Questions relating to business: “How would you describe Holland & Barrett to a person visiting from another country?” And finally, there are open-ended mental challenges, such as how you would weigh an elephant without using a scale – something for which Google is particularly known, an attempt to measure mental flexibility and even entrepreneurial potential. The answer? Nudge the beast on to a barge. The elephant’s weight will cause the barge to sink several inches in the water. Draw a line on the barge’s hull to mark the water level. Then direct the elephant back on to land. Load the barge with 100lb bags of sand (or whatever is handy) until it sinks to the line marked on the hull. The elephant weighs as much as the sand.

The style of interviewing at Google is indebted to an older tradition of using logic puzzles to test job candidates at technology companies. Consider this one: the interviewer writes six numbers on the room’s whiteboard – 10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66. The question is, what number comes next in the series?Most of the time, the job applicant stumbles around, gamely trying to make sense of a series that gives every indication of being completely senseless. Most candidates give up. A lucky few have a flash of insight.

Forget maths. Spell out the numbers in plain English, which gives you the following: ten nine sixty ninety seventy sixty-six. The numbers are in order of how many letters are in their names. Ten is not the only number you can spell with three letters. There’s also one, two and six. Nine is not the only four-letter number; there’s zero, four and five. This is a list of the largest numbers that can be spelled in a given number of letters.

Now for the payoff: what number comes next? Whatever number follows sixty-six should have nine letters in it (not counting a possible hyphen) and should be the largest nine-letter number. Play around with it and you’ll probably come up with ninety-six. It doesn’t look like you can get anything above 100, because that would start “one hundred” requiring 10 letters and upwards. You might wonder why the list doesn’t have 100 (hundred) in place of 70 (seventy). “Million” and “billion” have seven letters, too. A reasonable guess is that they’re using cardinal numbers spelled in correct stylebook English. The way you write out the number 100 is “one hundred”.

At many of these companies, the one and only correct answer is 96. At Google, 96 is considered to be an acceptable answer. A better response is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000. Aka “one googol”.

That’s not the best answer, though. The preferred response is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Ten googol.

Puzzles such as this have drawbacks as interview questions. The answer here is a simple matter of insight: either you get it or you don’t. There isn’t a process of deduction to relate, and thus no way to distinguish someone who solves the problem from someone who already knew the answer. At Google, of all places, anyone applying for a job knows how to use a search engine. It’s expected that candidates will Google for advice on Google interviews, including the questions asked. Consequently, Google encourages its interviewers to use a different type of question, more open-ended, with no definitive “right answer”.

Feeling frantic, stressed, and overwhelmed by your job search? The job search is uncertain, and the time and effort required is overwhelming.

If you are searching for a job and feeling this way, then you’re not alone. There are over 12.8 million Americans currently unemployed. Of those, over 1 million last month reported giving up on their search entirely, citing that they believe no jobs are available to them. You may even be close to giving up, too.Instead of giving you more career networking tips and job search advice, let me provide a few different ways of thinking about your job search.

Eastern philosophies for centuries have taught open-mindedness is essential to attaining clarity and enlightenment. Zen, for instance, is experiential wisdom, realized through meditation and disciplined self-realization. It is a practice that is concerned with what is, and not what you feel or think about what is. Combining Zen and the job search can provide you with new insight and clarity about what is really important to you here and now, while reducing job search anxieties.

To attain the ultimate job search enlightenment, here are three secrets of a Zen job seeker:

1) Let Go. You cannot do it all and you cannot control everything related to what you do. The one thing that most job seekers believe is that unless they do everything under the sun to land a job, they will miss their opportunities. If a person is so busy doing this and that and worrying about what happened yesterday and what might happen next month, then they will miss opportunities. Focus on the things you can control and forget the rest. Some things (like hiring decisions) are simply out of your control — no matter how many resumes you send, cold calls you make, or tweets, blogs, and emails you write. Accept this, focus on the things you can control, and you will experience less stress when things don’t go your way.

It’s no surprise that when you read articles like Nine Tips for Networking for Business Success they apply nicely to the job search—as in nine tips for networking for job search success. This is because the job search is like running a business…namely yours. That’s right, you have a marketing campaign which heavily relies on your ability to network your way to the perspective buyer, the employer.So when one of my LinkedIn contacts shared with me the aforementioned article by Kaarina Dillabough, I thought, this sounds similar to networking for job search success. And when Kaarina Dillabough asks in her article for suggestions for other networking tips, I thought, instead I will offer some networking tips for the job search.

You don’t have to like it, but you have to do it. Networking is not everyone’s favorite idea of spending an evening. To some it causes anxiety and utter fear—not just for the introverts, mind you. So get over the idea that you have to like it and remember the times your mother told you sometimes you have do things you don’t like.

Call it what it is, Connecting. Related to tip # 1, the word “connecting” seems gentler and more accurate. When you connect with someone, it’s more than a physical face-to-face encounter. With a connection there’s warmth and sense of accomplishment.

Make it natural for your sake and the sake of others. I hate to say this, but that 15, 30, 60 second commercial is not what people want to hear in most instances. At a natural connecting encounter (on the side of a soccer field, for example) the person with whom you’re speaking will be abhorred if you go into your memorized personal commercial. Relax and let the conversation unwind slowly and naturally.

Give yourself an edge to attract the attention of recruiters and hiring managers with these tools and techniques.

I’ve been in the business of helping people build their brands for a decade and each year, I publish my personal branding trends for job seekers. Take a look at this year’s trends and decide which will help give you an edge and attract the attention of recruiters and hiring managers.

1. Headshots Everywhere

Do you have a professional headshot?People want to connect a face with a name. We have come to expect a photo alongside a blog post, Facebook profile and online article. People are less likely to click on a photo-less LinkedIn profile; and they’re less inclined to believe Web-based content if the picture of the person who contributed it is missing. Yet many people are still reluctant to post their photo to the Web. Some fear age discrimination in hiring; others just aren’t happy with the photos they have. Since it’s becoming common for hiring managers and recruiters to use Google and social networks to find candidates, your first impression could be your LinkedIn profile or other online content.

What does this mean for you?Ensure those who are researching you get to connect a face with a name and credentials. Because there are so many places where your photo will appear — from your Google profile to your You Tube channel or about.me page — get a series of professional headshots and upload them to your social network profiles and Flickr or Picassa account. You don’t want someone doing a Google image search and seeing one photo replicated 30 times.

2. Crowdsourcing for Professionals

What do others say about you?

You’re only as good as the collective opinions of those who know you. Consultants have always understood the value of client feedback. Now, with the ease of requesting and providing recommendations, you too must be mindful of the power of external reviews. Virtually every new social network or app includes the opportunity to request and display reviews. LinkedIn calls them recommendations, BranchOut and BeKnown call them endorsements.

Honestly.com calls them reviews. Regardless of what you call them, they’re extremely important to those who are making decisions about you. A Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey determined that 90% of consumers trust peer reviews. Although no research to my knowledge has been done about this topic as it relates to people, I predict we will quickly become accustomed to using crowdsourcing to make decisions about each other.

What does this mean for you?If you are looking for a job, what others say about you will be critical to getting hired. Get out there and get testimonials, recommendations and endorsements and make them visible through various social media and your own Web site. Hiring managers will be dubious of those without any external recommendations.

3. Personal QR Codes

Do you have a QR code?

QR codes are taking off in all kinds of ways that weren’t originally anticipated. For example, according to brandchannel.com, it’s now possible to place extremely large QR codes on the tops of buildings that will be photographed by the satellites that feed Google Maps. The QR code will cause a logo of that company to appear when someone looks at their building’s images on Google. Putting a giant QR code on the top of your house may not be the best way to land a job. But you do have the opportunity to use QR codes to point those who are evaluating you to your Web sites, blogs and other relevant career marketing content. I have seen QR codes on the top of resumes, on business cards and on networking name-badges. Vizibility.com allows you to customize what people see when they click on your QR code – and change it often, so you can direct hiring managers to the perfect presentation of your capabilities.

What does this mean for you?You have a great opportunity to direct recruiters to the content you want them to see. If one of your brand attributes is ‘innovative,’ think about how you can use QR codes to tell others what you want them to know about you. If you’re a more seasoned professional and want to demonstrate that you’re innovative and on top of the latest trends, using QR codes on your resume and business card is like digital Botox. It will demonstrate that you are connected to what’s happening.